This blog provides advice to writers on their literary work.
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How can you get the full benefit of workshops? How can you work best with your mentor? What, when, and how should you publish?

Saturday, March 11, 2017

Steve Bannon on the Culture and Reason for Being of the United States—A Different View

I think that Bannon and Trump believe in a culture of the U.S.
that is dominated by one group—white Christians. In fact, their actions are
all aimed at creating a world lorded over by nations where white Christians rule.
Every one of their policies points toward this: the travel ban on six
predominantly Muslim countries, the denial of the Black Lives Matter movement
in favor of a blanket law-and-order policy, the expulsion of immigrants from
Latin America who have put down deep roots in the United States, the building
of a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, the embrace of Vladimir Putin and his
authoritarian state in Russia. Clearly the “reason for being” of the United
States in the mind of Steve Bannon is for white Christians to predominate in
America and globally.

What is the alternative to this culture and nation of white
Christian domination? There is another concept of the United States that
generations of Americans have been working toward, from the white-dress demonstrations
of the suffragettes, to the pro-union strikers who occupied the GM plant in Flint in 1936,
to the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, to the civil rights march from Selma to
Montgomery, to the Native American encampment resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline. That idea of the United States is one based on the most enlightened
and progressive strains of the American Revolution: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men [and women!] are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” as Thomas Jefferson so beautifully
phrased it in the Declaration of Independence.

That fundamental belief in the equality of all people and the sanctity of life is the true reason for being of the United States. Martin Luther King
Jr. expressed that vision of the U.S. when he said in his “I Have a Dream”speech: “we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls
down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The culture of the United States is not a private club. It is an open culture rooted in the traditions of Native
Americans and added to by every wave of arrivals to this country from every
latitude and longitude of dry land on the globe.

The culture of the United States is inherently a hybrid
culture. American culture blends melodies from Scotch-Irish fiddlers with
Yoruba drumming patterns to create jazz and country music. American culture combines
the humor of Yiddish theater and vaudeville with the theatrics of the
English stage to give birth to Hollywood movies. In American culture, lesbian
feminist poets write in the ghazal form devised by Arabic troubadours and
elaborated by Persian bards. American culture wants to try out knishes with Spanish
rice, it needs to taste Korean kimchee in Mexican burritos. It fuses ballet and
African dance and creates Alvin Ailey and Paul Taylor.

Yes, the United States has a reason for being and a culture.
That culture and that reason for being are fundamentally democratic,
pluralistic, and multicultural. Nothing that “the Donald” or Steve Bannon can
do will ever change that.